How Los Angeles' Air Quality Policies Benefit Minorities

This paper examines how air pollution control policies will affect the welfare of the different races in Southern California. The paper adopts the concept of the Net Welfare Impact (NWI) function to measure how air quality improvements affect the welfare (monetary and non-monetary) of individual households. The core finding is that many of the benefits of air quality improvement are enjoyed by minorities, especially Latinos (and African-Americans and Asians to a lesser extent), whose household incomes tend to be lower and family size larger than the regional average, and who are more likely to live in the neighbourhoods that are currently polluted. Thus, because minorities have suffered more from dirty air, they are the major beneficiaries from implementation of clean air policies. This is the result of the Federal clean air mandate that dictates uniform standards for all metropolitan areas.